Here are some tips for learning character animation in Poser for the several people who have asked about it recently. Please add your tips. Maybe we can throw this up as a sticky somewhere when this little list is more thorough. Note that almost all of these little tips have exceptions and/or can be expounded upon at length, but Im sick of typing :) Expound away if ya like.

1 For character animation practice with a simple character with no clothes, hair, texture or anything else to slow down your comp and you should be able to play back your animations in real time without having to render if your comp isnt too old. Spending 5 hours render time to discover your timing is off is a slow way to learn.

2 Work with the same frame rate as much as possible to help learn timing.

3 For major movement animate from the root (hip in Poser) bone out. I.e. if you spend a lotta time animating arm movement you might find afterward that abdomen movement you had to add throws off all your arm work. This is not a hard and fast rule, but helps in a lotta cases.

4 Dont overlook the value of IK even if it doesnt seem to exactly fit what youre doing. i.e. to generate some random minor movement turn on IK for any or all limbs and just key some minor hip (or abdomen or chest for arm movement only) rotations (just 1 or 2 degrees back and forth staggered a bit, for example, in more than one axis if you like) to make a standing or sitting figure seem more alive.

5 Use ockhams Naturalizer script to add eye blinks and breathing. A quick painless step that goes a long way to bringing a character to life.

6 Dont overlook the possibility of using point-at objects for eyes and even limbs sometimes.

7 Use the UI and Pose dots AND the all eight view ports. Id suggest setting up your default Poser scene with a basic figure (At least for the time youre going to spend learning to animate in Poser) as in #1 above and ALL EIGHT VIEW PORTS configured. For example. I like to have the two pane vertically oriented windows with one for front view and the other for left view. Have your basic figure loaded when you set up the view ports and UI dots. Most of the cameras will need adjustment.

8 Work with linear interpolation to start and add quaternion later. (Not a hard and fast rule, but a good starting point)

9 Manually create a few walk cycles! The walk designer is great, but creating a walk cycle yourself is excellent practice. Hint #1: To steal another quote from Martin Hash: The fewer key frames an animation has the more elegant it is. Hint #2: Dont forget about Figure/Symmetry/Swap Right and Left.

10 Insert a primitive or simple prop or even a floor with a grid drawn on it as a spatial frame of reference if need be. Delete it when youre done.

11 When limbs are flying around and youre stumped: Save your file with a new name, go to the animation pallet, highlight all key frames and set interpolation to linear. Replay your animation. If the movement looks pretty clean, but now machine-like of course, then the problem probably lies in overshoot with one or more parameters. After youve narrowed down the list of possible offending parameters (good luck) go to the graph for each individual parameter and see where your over shoot problems are. Sometimes its helpful to do the same process except change all keys to constant instead of linear, then step through your keys one by one. This can help you find a pose that you might have screwed up accidentally.

12 Do keyframing in the graph a lot, a whole lot. You can work fast this way once you get your head around it.

13 Set your camera animation off. Add camera animation when youre done with everything else.

14 To delete, for example, all key frames for a particular parameter or group of parameters use the animation pallet. To copy and paste key frames use the animation pallet. (copy and paste on the graph is unreliable on my XP system running P5).

Message edited on: 01/19/2005 15:42

Great list, esp. the emphasis on point-at. I'd add 11b. Sometimes you can stop overshoot easily by hitting the 'Spline Break' button at the last keyframe before the overshoot. This is less drastic than turning everything linear. Also, I wonder if anyone has managed to use "Animation Sets"? This looks like it should be a helpful feature, but I've never figured it out.

I've been curious about "Animation Sets", too. If I remember right the manual says something about them being made for some companies particular format (?). I dunno if they have practical use unless you're using that companies product. I'd love to learn if anyone knows otherwise, though.

...yes, of course if you know what parameter is causing your overshoot you can go straight to "spline break". But by saving as a new file it's really not too drastic to change the whole key sha-bang to linear for a quick peek )

Message edited on: 01/19/2005 16:06

Yeah, the Animation Set is tied to the VRML output. Still, I sort of halfway recall that somebody did manage to use it!

"Animation sets" are used to separate movements for web 3D. You can output the character in metastream format. Each animation set creates a button in the web document. This is also how you separate moves for characters used in Adobe Atmosphere. Animation Tip: Secondary motion is pivital in creating realistic animations. A good example of secondary motion would be a horse tail. As the horse runs, the tail follows the up and down motion of the body but slightly behind in timing. This gives the feeling of the body's movement causing the tail to move. Another example would be a figure quickly turning around and the arms following slightly behind and rocking a little bit before coming to rest at the side. Cheers, Joe

Do animation sets have any value within Poser itself if one isn't doing anything for the web or with Adobe Atmosphere? Thanks for the pointer on secondary motion...added to the list along with ockhams spline break point.

Tunesy: Not that I know of. NP on the secondary motion. Glad I could add something.

Hmmm. Don't know if I missed it in the previous posts, but it should be mentioned that, whenever possible, you should always render to image sequences when doing a final render. It provides much more control and security when working on longer animations. You can turn the image sequences into movie files in almost any decent video editor.

(Bookmarked) Great List guys!!

Thanks, Max. Added to the list. This is meant mainly to get newbies to animation going, not so much for rendering, but it's never too early for one to learn that point.

This one might be somewhat valuable to newbies: I know that some people who do still images like to pose a character by manipulating body parts by hand, and when it comes to animation, they completely ignore using IK (Inverse Kinematics) because it prevents you from doing that to great extent. However, precisely positioning body parts using the XYZ/rotate translation dials exclusively can save you a lot of trouble. In Poser, it's difficult to get good results trying to pose or animate a character by directly moving body parts in the viewport window itself. This is particularly true where IK are involved.

Save sequences you like to the Pose library, with IK turned OFF. Use IK to position feet nicely on the ground, then switch it off to tweak foot bend/twist/side-side. Use the dials for fine control. Use the orthogonal views when moving body parts in the document window. Use Smooth Lined view to check for intersections. Collision detection is way too slow. Something I just thought up (haven't tested it yet): create two point lights, set their intensity to zero, turn off shadows and animating, parent them to the left and right foot, and name them LFootLight and RFootLight. Name the corresponding shadow cams LFootCam and RFootCam. Position the lights close to the feet. Now you have the equivalent of the Hand cams for the feet.

Excellent. Thanks, svdl.

This should be number 1 on the list. "Learn to use the Graph pallete". It will make animating WAY easier. Here is the tip of all tips for the graph pallete: How do you adjust (for instance) the bending of an arm for the whole animation? I have loaded bvh files on a character only to have the arms bent upward for the whole animation. Like the arms are out of socket. Here is how to fix it. 1. Open the graph pallete 2. Select that arm and then select the bend channel in the graph pallete pulldown menu. 3. Click and drag in the spline area to select the keyframes. The selected area turns black. 3a. If you didn't get the whole thing in one swoop you can hold down the "shift" key and drag again to add to the selection. 4. Here comes the magic! with the cursor over the selected area press and hold the "CTRL" key. The cursor turns into 2 up and down arrows. 5. While holding down the CTRL key, click and drag in the (now black) spline area and watch the arm move up or down. > This is adjusting that arm in the bend channel for the WHOLE animation. Scrub throught the animation and you will noticed that this fixed the whole thing. It is usefull for other things as well. I.E. Moving the hips of a character up or down slightly for the whole animation. And now... I'm spent. Cheers, Joe

Thanks, Lawn. "Do keyframing in the graph a lot, a whole lot" from #12 above. The list is in no particular order, but, I agree, the animation graph deserves emphasis.

For 1 above - if you have a more complex animation that doesn't run through quickly enough within Poser, change to smooth shaded display then render with the current display settings instead of the render settings. It'll render out with all of the props and cloths in place but at lighting speed - it will take as long to render as it takes to play through within Poser. You'll get a good preview of your animation, and at exactly the same speed as the final rendered version would be.

Good one John.

Thanks, John. People wanting to learn how to animate don't need to mess with rendering, but that's good info to know.

It's helped me learn how to animate because it gives you good quick feedback on the results. I find that the playback within Poser runs a little too slowly. As an example, V3 standing up over 30 frames takes about seven seconds to play through within poser, far too slow to be sure what your animation really looks like. If you render it using the current display settings, then your 30 frame render will only take seven seconds to record, and you get a full speed version instead. It's helped me spot unnatural movements and sudden stops that didn't really show up inside Poser.

I agree on this one. When I animate, I do many many renderings this way. You just can't see the true motion of your scene without it.

Attached Link: IK at work

personally animate nude characters in bounding box mode
for realtime playback.
when I am satisfied with the motion I l ways export ti a a BVH file
so i can later apply to a fully dressed/propped figure

and yes while IK cause problems for Still prepackaged pose users
it is invaluable to us animators seeking to create realistic movement.

...we don't need to use V3 as our "simple character". That kinda defeats the purpose )) For purposes of learning to animate it's just not necessary to add rendering to the process. You can certainly do it, but it's just adding a layer of unnecessary time to the learning process. I guess as Poser junkies we're just itchin' to hit that render button, though ;) Maybe I shoulda clarified at the beginning that these little steps aren't really for finished animations, but just the learning process. My bad. Sorry.

That bvh tip is nice. Thanks, wolf. Never thought about it before. That'll come in handy.

If you're going to do a major full screen output render, it's better to render a series of uncompressed stills and then use a video editing program to do final conversion to video. Pros: -Better quality image from no compression. -Alpha channels available in some formats -If the render gets interrupted it's easy to start back up at the last successfully rendered frame -You can use uncompressed source material and compress your movie at different sizes and using different forms of compression to find the best quality/file size trade off for your needs. Cons: This could take up a lot of space on your hard drive It adds a step to your production process.

A mini-tip to expand on Joe's suggestion: When working with a range of keyframes in the graph pallette, try moving the range of keyframes with the CTRL key pressed while IK is on, such as moving the ytran for the hip while IK is on for the legs. You can use it to make a figure crouch more or stand up straighter throughout an animation. Also works for arms, such as keeping hands in place over a keyboard then adjusting the bend keyframes for the chest or abdomen to make the figure hunch over the keyboard more (or less).

Tguyus: Good addition. Tunesy: If this is an unbiased list about animating, that movie rendering tip should be in there. It is a tip for newcomers to make animating faster and easier. Just because it isn't creating a keyframe does not mean that it has nothing to do with animating. I use this process regardless of what character I use. It has worked wonderfully. They also use this technique in animation studios.

Good point, Tguyus. I use IK and move ranges of keyframes in the graph a lot, but never thought to use them together. Thanks for the tip.

...yea. Enough people seem to be concerned about rendering that I'll go ahead and append a little section for it. The ground up animation-process generally consists of six steps: Modeling, rigging, texturing, lighting, animating and rendering. This was intended to be solely about learning animation basics in Poser, but, what the heck. Let's throw in some rendering stuff ;)

One of the first suggestions made in this thread was to use ockham's Naturalizer script. To that I would add a more generalized suggestion to explore the wide variety of python scripts out there to see what might be useful for you. Ockham and others have created some truly amazing scripts which have saved me hours of tedious work. A few of the key scripts I use very frequently for animation and which might be immediately useful to others include:

Emphasizer -> scale and shift parameter values, and ockham's latest version even adds a randomizer.

Hold Still -> ockham has created two versions: one for legs and one for arms. Plant a figures feet in frame 1, for example, then hit Hold Still Legs and it turns on IK, then deletes the keyframes for the thighs, shins, and feet.

Sparsifier -> another ockham creation (see a pattern here?), this deletes extraneous keyframes to make it easier to manually adjust splines.

So... check out python!

Excellent. Thanks, Tguyus. We're lucky we have a guy like ockham around. Without him and geep I think I'd still be fumbling around trying to load a figure.

Render at current display is certainly the biggest tip, esp. for folks who have been doing stills for a while! Along the same lines of 'unlearning'... Don't worry much about fine lighting or texturing until the final render, if at all. While developing, just use one or two lights with cast-shadows turned off. Motion is what counts; human eyes are built to catch motion above all. The finest atmospherics won't help if the motion is wrong.

..."Motion is what counts; human eyes are built to catch motion above all. The finest atmospherics won't help if the motion is wrong." -- ockham I'm going to make that the header when I have a chance to organize this list a bit. That's the whole point of this thread. Thanks, ockham.

bookmarked

Message edited on: 01/21/2005 07:00

Wow! This has shaped up to be a pretty amazing list. It has already been briefly mentioned but I just wish to emphasize the technique of changing your document display settings to "Cartoon with Lines" for doing quick animations. If you turn off all of the axis displays on your props etc... you can quickly create some really amazing stuff wit pretty much zero rendering time. The look reminds me of old fashioned Cell Animation. Some of he stuff I've seen using this techique sort of has a look to it as if it were cut right from the original movie "Heavy Metal". I recall how impressed I was when I first learned about this nifty little feature of poser. I think beginners really should give it a whirl. from the tool menu select >display > document style > Cartoon w/lines Then take your eye dropper tool and color the everything in the studio and you are ready to animate.

Has anyone found a way to get realtime playback of one of the more complex models like M3 or V3? I know it was suggested to quick render but of course it would be ideal to just have it playback smoothly in the viewport. It is rather sluggish. Anyone have any luck getting it to play smoothly straight off the timeline at 24fps? (rough shaded or smooth shaded preferrably). And if so, what are the specifications on the computer? Hopefully Poser 6 OpenGL will speed this up tremendously.